“You need a hand with that?” a camper asked his neighbour who was having some trouble setting up a tent on Thursday in Africville Park.

The park was already dotted with tents and camper-trailers in the park on the shore of Halifax Harbour, even though the Africville reunion wouldn’t officially begin until the next day. Families and friends sat in the shade of their canopies, some eating lunch, others chatting quietly while they watched the sites fill up around them.

The neighbourly spirit that pervaded the grounds would be familiar to anybody who returns to the same campground every year. But while relaxation and socializing have been a big part of the Africville reunion over its 35-year history, the ghosts of past injustices also hover in the sultry July air.

“This is not just a weekend to camp and play with the kids, enjoy the air, that too, but it’s really a time just to remember what a remarkable and resilient people who lived here, you know?” said camper Carrie Hill over a plate of chicken and salad, who has attended these reunions since she was nine years old. “What they endured. Nobody can even imagine that.”

Like many of the thousands of people expected to attend the 10-day event, the Virginia Beach, Va., resident has come a long way to celebrate with family and friends on the spot where a black community thrived from the early 1800s to the 1960s.

But between 1964 and 1970, residents were removed with many families being placed in public housing projects, the Africville Museum website recounts: “Homes were demolished and the church (Seaview United Baptist) bulldozed in the middle of the night.”

The then City of Halifax took over the land and turned it into Seaview Park at the north end of Barrington Street on the Bedford Basin below the A. Murray MacKay Bridge.

“It truly is a reunion,” said Lyle Grant, the co-chair of the 35th annual Africville reunion committee and the vice-chair of the Africville Heritage Trust, which looks after the museum. “It’s a family reunion when people talk about old times, talk about what could have been, what should have been, all that stuff and how we were done wrong by the city. We’ll try to get over it, but we never do.”

Grant and other organizers have put together a busy schedule of events including a dinner and dance gala at the nearby Fleet Club (which is sold out), bingo, a cultural day where elder members of the community will recount their memories of Africville and a flea market.

Vendors will be on site selling crafts and food, said Grant, adding that many campers including himself hopefully will be eating mackerel hooked from the harbour, itself a long tradition in Africville.

A special event this year will see a wreath laid in the harbour in memory of the five Africville residents who died in the Halifax Explosion on the morning of Dec. 6, 1917.

“This is going to be a busy spot for 10 days, we got something planned for every day,” said Grant, 63, of Cherrybrook.

“There’s much socializing that’s going to be going on, a whole lot of socializing and that’ll be the biggest thing, right? Then of course at the end of it on a Sunday (July 29), we have a large Sunday service that will be taking place. That’s something we do every year at the reunion.”

While Africville holds a special place in many hearts, the event is a reminder for Hill about the interconnectedness of the black communities in Nova Scotia such as North and East Preston and Cherrybrook.

“My mother’s people came from East Preston area, she married a Carvery and moved out here,” said Hill, who stays with her mother in Lower Sackville when she returns each summer to Nova Scotia.

“I haven’t been to North Preston since I was a young girl but my uncle George he was big in North Preston, George Grant, they’ll know who my mother was and so on. I’m more welcome because you’re so interconnected with these communities.”